Open Adoption Roundtable #4: Small Moments

The Open Adoption Roundtable is a series of occasional writing prompts about open adoption. It’s designed to showcase of the diversity of thought and experience in the open adoption community. You don’t need to be part of the Open Adoption Bloggers list to participate, or even have a traditional open adoption. If you’re thinking about openness in adoption, you have a place at the table.

Publish your response during the next week–linking back here so we can all find one other–and leave a link to your post in the comments. If you don’t blog, you can always leave your thoughts directly in the comments.

My mom is an (amazing, dedicated) elementary school teacher. One of the writing strategies she uses with her students is called small moments writing. Instead of writing a typical seven-year old’s paragraph that, say, summarizes everything they did in a day, they write about a single, small moment: what it felt like to ride on the bumpy bus or a flower they saw as they walked to school. It’s about learning to dive creatively into a single moment in time and flesh it out with details and descriptive words.

I thought it would be a nice exercise for us, both to record a memory for ourselves and to give others a glimpse into our families’ open adoptions. So our fourth assignment is to write about a small moment that open adoption made possible. It might be about something that happened during an interaction or conversation if you have face-to-face contact. Or a moment centered on a letter or picture, if you don’t. Just a single, small moment that could not have happened if the adoption were not open.

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SocialWkr24/7 at Eyes Open Wider writes about being the intermediary when mother and her two children regain a small measure of healing contact after a decade apart.

Ginger at Puzzle Pieces recalls a long-ago Halloween moment between two daughters–one placed, one parented–and their question that still weighs on her.

Debbie B at Always and Forever Family tells how ultimate trust has come full circle between them and their daughter’s first mother.

Luna at life from here writes about the power of being present at her adopted daughter’s birth.

Britney at Beauty for Ashes reflects on a recent moment of shared intimacy with her son’s adoptive grandmother.